Headlong on the road to nowhere

Australia has lost only one soldier in Iraq, but it has suffered
plenty of collateral damage, writes Paul McGeough.

THE Australian chapter of the Iraq war has to be from a script -
but who wrote it? Gilbert and Sullivan perhaps in
collaboration with Joseph Heller or maybe the team from
M*A*S*H?

This is the war that the Howard Government insisted we had to
have, but in which it never really wanted to take part. More than
three years into the conflict, George Bush has demonstrated an
unambiguous determination to fight; and amid much bungling, he has
paid dearly - in blood, treasure and credibility.

Australia, on the other hand, has spent its time in Iraq ducking
and weaving well away from the front line, at the same time as MPs
at home huff and puff and make po-faced speeches about "wartime
leadership" and "being at war".

To get a seat for the Iraq show, a few Australians had to be on
the front line for the US-led invasion in March 2003. But within
days of the fall of Baghdad, the Government worked out where its
troops would face the least danger. And that's where you find the
Australians protecting their own, or staying right out of
harm's way.

The upshot is that Australia's Iraq war has been light on for
combat, the business of war, at the same time as it is replete
either with bungles such as Wednesday night's shooting of an Iraqi
Trade Ministry security guard or posturing like the recent Howard
visit to Washington.

This week, the spin from the Defence Minister, Brendan Nelson,
is that the Australian troops might be home by Christmas. Put to
one side the fact that it cuts through all the Bush-Howard rhetoric
about staying until the job is done; Nelson has opened the door to
an early look at how history might be shaped.

Failing any more stuff-ups, if Gilbert and Sullivan were brought
in as the official historians, they would have great difficulty
resisting the unfortunate death of Private Jake Kovco as an opening
metaphor.

On the evidence so far, the young father of two died as he and
his mates were doing a bit of what Australian politicians seem to
have been doing throughout the Iraq war  play-acting. It was
a bullet fired from his pistol that killed Kovco in the relative
comfort of his living quarters, within the relative safety of the
Baghdad green zone.

Kovco is the Australian military's only Iraq fatality, but it
was an accidental death that might have happened in any barracks.
It cannot be seriously included among the "Iraq war dead".

Despite all that, the Australian military could not bring him
home with dignity or efficiency. The Americans have shipped more
than 2500 bodies home - and have not lost a one. But with only one
for the entire war, the Australians mislaid Kovco's remains when
they chose the cut-rate services of a Kuwaiti undertaker to
repatriate him. And when they tried to establish what went wrong,
the investigating officer left a disk version of her report in an
airport lounge which was leaked to Derryn Hinch.

But before Kovco, there was WMD and AWB. Canberra fell for all
the Washington make-believe on Saddam Hussein's non-existent
weapons of mass destruction like a kid being fooled by
magicians.

But despite its determination to bring down an evildoer, the
Government claims it could see nothing when all the evidence of
AWB's evildoer deals with Saddam - kickbacks worth $300 million in
what has been dubbed the wheat-for-weapons scam - flooded just
about every desk in Canberra.

And if the Australian military has been staying out of trouble
in Iraq, the same cannot be said of the civilian engineer Douglas
Wood, kidnapped by insurgents last year. Again, Australia showed
its deft understanding of the Arab world, dispatching a rescue team
that showed all the signs of being out of its depth.

A Sunni tribal leader, Sheik Hassan Zadaan, publicly claimed to
have contacts through which he might be able to negotiate Wood's
release - and he made sure his phone number and his willingness to
meet the rescue team were passed to the Australian embassy.

The Australians did drop in on the sheik - dozens of them,
slithering down ropes from hovering choppers in the dead of night,
exploding noise grenades, trashing his home and taking him and a
bunch of his household guards as prisoners. Zadaan was accused of
being the kidnapper.

He was held without charge and released a few days later, but it
was another five long weeks before Wood was accidentally sprung
from captivity by Iraqi forces on other business.

So there was no surprise yesterday when the Prime Minister
briefed Parliament on the relocation of the bulk of the Australian
contingent within Iraq - a move brought on by Japan's decision to
withdraw its men who were being protected by the Australians.

He laid it on about the bravery of Australians in uniform. But
that is never in doubt - what is in doubt is the will of his
Government to put security and other resources where they are most
desperately needed in a struggling country.

Till now, apart from 100-odd men camped in Baghdad's green zone
who guard Australian diplomats, the Australians have been at Camp
Smitty in the far south-west of Iraq, so far from the Baghdad
shooting gallery it might as well be in neighbouring Saudi
Arabia.

Their new camp will be 80 kilometres down the road at Tallil, a
coalition air base. Again, the Italians, who were stationed at
nearby Nasiriyah after the invasion, faced strife that included a
lethal car bomb. But even John Howard could not ramp the risk: "The
intelligence assessments available to the Government indicate that
the areas in which the ADF will be operating have among the
lowest threat levels in comparison to the rest of Iraq."

It all makes you wonder how these things are negotiated. For all
their mistakes, the Americans and the British do do the heavy
lifting in the war. Australia doesn't. And despite the
extraordinary language of Bush's praise for Howard, the US
President's diplomatic staff must work hard to keep the smirk from
their faces when the Australians call.

The Australians have a deserved combat reputation and the
Americans prefer to work more closely with them than with the
British. All of which means that if you cut through the diplomatic
face-saving, the Australians must front up, saying: "We'll give you
all the help we can but we don't want any of the
complication and risk of being in a war zone."

It's a pity the Iraqis who were killed or injured as an
Australian convoy roared away from Baghdad's Trade Ministry on
Wednesday could not make such a request. And it might be a pity,
too, for Australian farmers. Since the invasion, Howard's US allies
have taken the lion's share of the hugely lucrative Iraq wheat
trade.

Given that this week's shooting bungle unfolded on the steps of
Baghdad's Trade Ministry and the angry outpourings of the Trade
Minister, Abdul Falah Al-Sudany, there could well be some truth in
the warning by a Sydney wag yesterday afternoon: "There goes the
wheat trade!"

Oh, what a lovely war

The shoot-out in which Australian forces killed a security guard in
Baghdad on Wednesday is the latest incident in which John Howard
seems to be out of its depth.

>>INTELLIGENCE

The Government fell for George Bush's fabricated case for war.

>>TRADE

We await the report of the Cole inquiry into AWB kickbacks, worth
about $300 million, to Saddam Hussein before the invasion.
Ministers, officials and diplomats have had to explain how they
missed endless warnings of AWB's sanction-busting.

>>LITTLE ACTION

Apart from providing security for Australian officials in Baghdad,
the military's key tasks have been in exceptionally secure or very
remote areas, and guarding Japanese units in remote Al-Muthanna
province.

>>HOSTAGES

A rescue team sent by the Government wrongly concluded that a
tribal sheik who volunteered to help negotiate Douglas Wood's
release was the hostage-taker. Landing from helicopters, they
attacked his home and arrested him.

>>JAKE KOVCO

His death was an accidental shooting, not in combat. The only
Australian serviceman to die in Iraq, the ADF still lost his body.
A draft report on what went wrong in the repatriation of his body
was left in a Melbourne airport lounge - where someone found it and
passed it to broadcaster Derryn Hinch.

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plenty of collateral damage, writes Paul McGeough.World